Azure's native tools are good. Here's what they don't do.

StratoLens isn't a replacement for Azure's tooling. It's built on it. We use Azure Resource Graph and Activity Logs under the hood. The difference is what happens next: one unified view across every subscription, with history, instead of five portals and a pile of KQL.

Capability by capability

An honest look. Where native tools cover it, we say so. "Partial" means the data exists in Azure but assembling it across subscriptions is on you.

Comparison of Azure native tools and StratoLens by capability
Capability	Azure native tools	StratoLens
Cross-subscription single view	Partial Azure Resource Graph can query across subscriptions with KQL, but most portal blades scope to one subscription at a time.	Yes Every dashboard, search, and report covers all scanned subscriptions by default, with no queries to write.
Change history beyond 90 days	Partial The Activity Log retains 90 days by default. Longer retention means exporting to Log Analytics or storage and querying it yourself.	Yes Full infrastructure snapshots on every scan. Compare any two points in time with side-by-side diffs and change attribution.
RBAC analysis with usage data and nested groups	Partial IAM blades show who has access at each scope. Correlating assignments with actual usage, or tracing nested Entra ID group chains, is manual work.	Yes Correlates role assignments with up to 365 days of Activity Log data and resolves nested group memberships down to individual users.
Orphaned-resource detection	Partial Azure Advisor surfaces some idle-resource recommendations, but assembling a complete waste inventory across subscriptions is on you.	Yes Finds unattached disks, unused public IPs, and idle services across your estate, with the cost impact of each one.
Cost anomaly alerting tied to root cause	Partial Cost Management offers anomaly alerts, but they are not correlated with the infrastructure changes that caused the spike.	Yes Detects unusual cost changes and correlates them with the infrastructure modifications behind them, classified by severity and dollar impact.
Network topology visualization	Partial Network Watcher provides topology views, but keeping a current, whole-estate picture with cross-VNet routing is largely manual.	Yes Interactive diagrams generated automatically from scans: VNet peering, subnets, NSGs, and simulated route tracing across VNets and firewalls.
RI / Savings Plan coverage in one view	Partial Reservation and Savings Plan data lives in Cost Management blades. Combining utilization, wastage, and renewals into one view takes assembly.	Yes One dashboard for every commitment: utilization trends, underutilization alerts, expiring-commitment warnings, and purchase recommendations.
Data stays in your Azure tenant	Yes It is Azure, so your data never leaves Microsoft's platform.	Yes Deploys as a Managed Application inside your own tenant. All infrastructure information stays within your environment.
Flat, predictable pricing	Yes Largely free or included with your Azure subscription; some underlying services (e.g. log retention) bill by usage.	Yes Flat tiers with every feature included: no per-seat licensing, no percentage of spend. Its own infrastructure typically runs under $1/day.

Where the difference shows up

If you're doing FinOps...

Cost Management answers "what did we spend?" well, but tracing a spike back to the change that caused it, across dozens of subscriptions, is where the hours go. StratoLens correlates cost anomalies with infrastructure changes and surfaces orphaned resources and commitment wastage in the same place.

StratoLens for FinOps

If you're prepping an audit...

Auditors ask who has access, whether they use it, and what your infrastructure looked like six months ago. Assembling that from IAM blades and exported Activity Logs takes days. StratoLens keeps snapshot history, correlates role assignments with up to 365 days of activity, and resolves nested group access.

StratoLens for compliance

If you're running platform engineering...

You own dozens of subscriptions and the question "what changed?" lands on your team first. StratoLens gives you one searchable view of the estate, automatic network diagrams that stay current, and a change timeline you don't have to reconstruct from logs.

StratoLens for platform teams

Where native tools fit

For a single subscription with a small, slow-changing estate, the portal, Cost Management, and Azure Advisor cover the day-to-day basics, and they're included with Azure. Teams fluent in KQL can recreate slices of this with Resource Graph queries and workbooks, but keeping those queries, exports, and dashboards accurate as the environment changes quickly becomes an engineering project of its own. Even then, it only ever shows you the present, not the history behind it.

Most environments cross that line sooner than expected. The moment the estate spans multiple subscriptions, an auditor asks for history nobody thought to export, or an incident review needs to know what changed and when, native tooling stops being free. That's the gap StratoLens closes: continuous snapshots, cost context, and audit-ready documentation in one place, without the build-and-maintain burden.